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Yes folks, it's Slim Pickins this month, though while the pearls
are fewer they shine just as bright. We blame not you, readers and
participants, but ourselves, as our always-present eye on Slashdot got
infected for a few weeks; you'll note a preponderance of late
September postings. Open Source people often say that "many eyes make
all bugs shallow", which while demonstrablyfalse
sure is fun to say. Even so, we always accept links to excellent
postings from anywhere on the World Wide Internet at our e-cyberspace
address, trollback at gmail dot com. So send us your favorites, and
thanks for reading.

This month's topic icon is a ass. We
don't really feel the need to qualify.

I do not see IPv6 being accelerated with proxy servers - IPv6 deployment is already going as fast as it can.While IPv6 fixes many problems in IPv4, the developed world will not embrace IPv6 until many shortcomings in the protocol are addressed. As a Brown University grad student, the subject of IPv6 is what my disseration is upon. Allow me to include a few talking-points on what I've learned. Cisco routers suck at IPv6. Many of cisco's routers use the router's CPU to process IPv6 [cont]...

I can't post non-anonymously as it could jeapordize my career. I work at a mid-level office position at the DHS (Department of Homeland Security). Several months ago papers started to circulate about how to effectively ban arial photoography to prevent precise measurement and targetting of sensitive targets (nuclear power plants, etc). If you live near a target like this you'll soon notice a large fenced area with a large white square building in the center. This building hides a [cont]...

Wow, I can't believe people are so selfish that they'd risk the U.S.'s relations with another country just so they, and _possibly_ others, can see what happened. If the FBI wants documents classified, the FBI has a good reason. I don't want another 9/11 in the U.S. or a foreign country just because people want to see some documents.

Joining the WTO would require Iran to abide by internationally agreed upon IP regulations (Bourne Convention) and the impact of suddenly enforcing copyright law against its citizens would be very heavy.Even limiting enforcement to the government computer systems would result in significant layouts of cash to Microsoft (and other software makers). Iran is simply not in a position to make that kind of investment.Likewise, it is difficult to see how Microsoft could do business with the r [cont]...

First off, I fully agree with the Linux folks on this one and rebuff the MPAA demands. It is absolutely idiotic for this kind of action to be taken without even the slightest consideration of the actual infringement impossibilities of the software names.That said, I think there's a lot to be considered when choosing a software project name. One that quickly and accurately describes or at the very least gives a hint as to the functionality of the package is great. The kinds that the [cont]...

And I can safely assume that it doesn't because I trust that no hackers have entered my home (except myself, of course) and altered the hardware to such an extent that paranoia regarding the hardware is necessary.I think that every time stories like this appear in the mainstream press, that hackers in general become more and more externalized from society. You start to change things such that you end up being your own 'Little Brother' with your prying eyes everywhere and soon enough y [cont]...

I had VoIP for about 3 weeks (early June to June 30) before I got too frustrated. It was down pretty frequently; not nearly as dependable as my AT&T line. I got an echo, and the sound quality never was as good as a phone. I just decided to stick to cellular access, and cancelled before I started another month of fees. I'm happy with AT&T.

Now this is what I call front page material. Any normal slashdot article would have about 50-100 comments by now. This one has 5 (4 of which are trolls). Anime should be in its own section, IMHO. Its only here because of Taco's love of it. I really don't consider it a 'nerdy' thing. Sure, lotsa geeks are anime fanboys, and some actually enjoy the plots and stuff in the movies, but it really doesn't fit in with technology and science in my opinion. So I say give it its own section s [cont]...

My question is: Is this software as good as the ever-extensible Kwiki implementation?My question is: is there anything Microsoft can do that we won't question?Applaud them for their newfound approach to open source. More alternatives are always better. I'll bet this software does something Kwiki can't do.

I feel the need to lay out some ground rules before we go on:1.) Microsoft is somehow responsible for all third-party DLLs on a system. Their scanner must contain a self-sufficient, learning AI that just knows which DLLs to scan on any system in existence.2.) Mozilla was affected by this same vulnerability, but it's okay because it's Mozilla and not Microsoft.3.) When Mozilla's XUL bug was marked Confidential since 1999 only to be revealed earlier this year when exploits came out [cont]...

8AC, Awards:+15acct+1low+12mod

48|(0,6,19,10%)Sheetrock | "It's pretty amazing when you think about it."

Mars always seemed just out of reach when I first took interest in astrology. The planet most like our own in the solar system, it's the logical next step for our move off this planet as we begin to explore and colonize space and it's quite encouraging to see that this is a possibility -- although hopefully more success will be had with landing manned spacecraft on its surface.I suppose another thing I've always hoped to see was signs of life in the universe. Although we've discovere [cont]...

42|(-1,9,16,6%)Anton Anatopopov | "All of this could easily have been avoided."

It's obvious to anyone that this scenario could easily have been avoided. The issue here is the restrictive nature of the GPL. Had this code been released under the more flexible and free BSD license, none of these issues would arise.Stallman has set back the cause of quality free software by 20 years with his viral-like GPL, which infects everything it comes into contact with.Notice that Apple based their OS around the Darwin kernel, precisely because of the major problems inhera [cont]...

I see a few comments in here questioning the logic or similarity of this project to the already failed thin-client model that was once promised to revolutionize business computing. It seems to me the point is not to put all the eggs in one handbag -- but quite the opposite; to increase the capability and flexibility of an already capable and flexible system. This isn't an end in itself, but rather a means to discover or fully realize other possibilities with Linux that hinge upon gre [cont]...

You want to put Debian on the systems because of the vast array of software available for it.They want to run IBM solutions because they can trust that the few apps that they actually want to run on the system will run with no trouble.The trouble here is that you want Debian on the systems for your own selfish reasons. They want to run their systems as reliably as possible. Since this is a business and not a college dorm room, the business case will always win out.Debian is a fine di [cont]...

Given that there is already a rudimentary text-to-speech package available for Linux, and now a speech-to-text package, perhaps the secret is to pipe one to the other in a closed loop until one learns how to enunciate and the other how to listen?

It seems like this is a good deal for everyone all around except that in the end VoIP is still another manifestation of the infinitely malleable POTS system. All those bits are travelling over the same wires as those expensive long distance calls are. The only difference is in who is paying for that bandwidth.With normal long distance calling, the burden is borne by the person making the call or the receiver in the case of a collect call. In VoIP, the burden is already being paid fo [cont]...

I think I've read somewhere that solar panels cost more in energy to create than they ever produce. Is this correct? When I thought about it, it seemed entirely plausible, as there is a lot of steel in there that needs to be welded.On another note, I've also read that the Chinese were not responsible for chopsticks, although they were responsible for fortune cookies. Apparently chopsticks were invented just 200 years ago in San Francisco.Can anyone clear this up for me please? [cont]...

A question we have to ask oursevles is why did the jenemy attack the WTC, when there were more politically explosive (White House) and economically important (NY stock exchange) targets? My best guess is that it was due to the underlying symbol of the twin towers.It's a well established fact of modern architecture that skyscrapers represent masculinity. I don't want to make it anymore explicit than that. The act of throwing up a huge public, tapering monument is very symbolic of what d [cont]...

When someone as prominent and as much an annoyance to the coporate capitalist power structure as Richard Stallman has a nearly fatal accident we SHOULD start asking if there is a conspiracy to murder him.The free software movement is in the crosshairs. Why do you think software patents have become such an issue recently? Did SCO come up with the idea of its copyright attack on Linux on its own all of a sudden? Some investor immediately gave it the cash infusion it needed to per [cont]...

1AC, Awards:+1acct+1mod

LA Confidential

CmdrTaco is going to be on television in LA, before his globe
trotting lifestyle takes him to Google and universities worldwide to
teach them how to build scaleable next generation Linux based
websites. Additionally he notes that the few readers of his journal
can send in email to get free tickets. Now, so can you. Plz
snd pix thx.

Is it troll or is it Memorex?

This
post over at dKos: is it good or is it whack? Either way, we're
having fun watching the locals stick up for their local troll, er,
satirist? We thought "oversampling" was some electronica nerd thing,
but perhaps it's also the tool of the carpetbagger. Who knew.

What's the sound of one web site biting? Probably something akin to
the collective groan that went up from this
submission about eliminating "Pirate to Pirate" file sharing tools
on a network. Shockingly absolutely no on-topic comments were
posted, though to prove that denial isn't just the world we live in,
Linux apologists kicked it up to 11 in this story
about a company reversing its Linux migration. We're sure it was
all the fault of Harvard MBA's, who are all uneducated, worthless
jerks (+1, Informative).

No apologies for the delay, dear readers, hurricane season is afoot
and we've learned our lesson. For future reference, we present the
following tips to publishing a successful online magazine during
tropical storms:

Peapod does not deliver to disaster areas.

An Internet cafe in Sheboygan does actually beat a T1 line
under water, no matter what your cousin told you.

This isn't the first time a huge company has made an embarassing translation error.There is that old classic when Ford introduced the Pinto in Brazil. After watching sales go nowhere, the company learned that Pinto is Brazilian slang for small penis. Ford pried the nameplates off all of the cars and substituted them with Corcel which means horse.

How about just respecting women? So many times I talk or I see another woman talk to you guys and your eyes just gloss over like you go into some standby mode until we finish. Then many of you keep right on as if we said nothing at all. Just a thought. Madison

Of the list of slashdot topics [slashdot.org], only Microsoft and the Windows icons are of a derogatory and belittling nature. Why is it so hard that the editors can't use the appropriate icons for them? It's time this site starts to grow up.

There are two simple reasons why microsoft does not incorporate these techniques into windows. Windows runs on many different pieces of hardware. Not all hardware supports the options that these accelerators need. Believe it or not, not everyone has an AGP video card. Linux is not faster as a desktop than windows. As the gnome and kde desktops are the main competition for Microsoft Windows, it does not make sense for microsoft to make windows as fast as it can, because Linux is [cont]...

28AC, Awards:+92acct+2bust+5low+1acup+31mod

200|(4,33,74,17%)Sanity | "News about how great Apple is, Stuff that Matters"

congrats to Apple for a job well doneDo Apple have to pay for all the free advertising and advocacy they geton Slashdot? I mean, lets take a look at some of the opinions youwon't hear on Slashdot (from here [downhillbattle.org]): It's too expensive Let's start simple: the iTunes Music Store is not a good value forcustomers. Apple says many users are buying whole albums for $8-$12each. That's less than the $16 store price, but used CDs at Amazon orebay cost $5, and those come with line [cont]...

Before getting all excited about this, it is worth noting the following:Photons have mass.An eclipse means less photons are emitted and reach the measurer.Ergo, gravitational effect.Although it is well known that if your effect has a name it instantly has more credibility, I'm a bit skeptical that this is the one that'll turn relativity on its ear (dark matter is another story...)

Ten years after Demi Moore went for a million bucks, we've found a way to bring the objectification of women to a new level. The computer is apparently Larry Flynt's new meat grinder.It's sad to see the rate at which our runaway technological advances outstrip the advancement of society. In one hundred years we've developed flight, space travel, nuclear physics, gene therapy, and global digital communications networks, but we still can't get past treating women like property instead of [cont]...

All the submitter did was link to a blog entry that listed a couple of public advisories and mentioned Mozilla. Apparently, when put through the Slashbot filter, that becomes recent mass migration away from MSIE?According to Google Zeitgeist [google.com], IE 6 hasn't dropped at all and is still massively slaughtering the competition. In fact, Slashdot's own browser statistics show that IE is the majority browser for people accessing this website! Also note that every year is th [cont]...

MD5 has been proven to have collisions. Use sha1sum, not md5sum. IMHO, the md5sum tool should be deprecated and removed from all future Linux distributions.

19AC, Awards:+55acct+2low+1acup+1bab+28mod

131|(0,27,60,5%)vuvewux | "Funny enough, I was planning on voting for Kerry."

I don't agree with most of the crap Bush believes in. For what it's worth, I think Bush is a sleazy, shady douchebag. And, save for the level-headed folk I see on Slashdot, I can't fucking stand Bush supporters and militant Republicans. I really hate those fucking pudgy, clean-shaven, uptight business suit republican twats on my campus. But my distaste for conservatives and Republicans pales in comparison to my distaste for whackjob liberals.The way the left-leaning have conducted [cont]...

You basically admitted that nobody will use it because copyrights are enforced. Heaven forbid people respect copyrights. You know, like we demand with the GPL. I actually got accused of trolling the other day because of my sig.

So who would be for reasonable copyright use? Badnarik [badnarik.org]?Just remember, unless the voting results in an exact tie, you're throwing your vote out anyway, so a vote for a third party candidate is as good as any.

I'm going off of memory, which may not be correct at all. But here are my assumptions:X-Chat is freeX-Chat may or may not be open sourceX-Chat borrows off of other GPL code What's the big deal? Its a free project that no one is getting money from. Now if it was a big corporation, trying to make a profit off of GPL'ed code, I'd see a problem, but this is just silly. The thing I notice most about GPL and open source in general is how many internal flame wars ensue. Just be happy thin [cont]...

PJ reckons: 'an astroturf campaign depends upon a non-moderated site Which, thankfully isn't slashdot. Most readers probably don't know this, but the editors have full control over moderation, and can use their unlimited mod points to mod stuff over and over again. It doesn't show up publicly, but editors have been doing this for quite some time.By doing this, they can trigger IP bans and therefore thwart these nefarious astroturfing campaigns. I trust the good editors here to [cont]...

People need to confront the DMCA, really see it for what it is. Right now, the law says thou shalt only play the movies in the way Hollywood prescribes, but it hasn't really internalized because so many people can use unlicensed software to do things like copy DVDs, play them without commercials, etc. I think the FBI needs to really crack down on anyone who violates the DMCA, by imprisoning everyone who copies a DVD for home use, especially rich and politically connected people. We co [cont]...

All Apple does invent one great product after another:iPodG5PowerbookOS XCinema Display(for openers)and they invest millions to make inexpensive music downloads available (at almost no profit). But they don't sell shovelboxes at $299 each, so let's kick Apple in the face again. Sounds great.

Fuck you, man, thinkers got to eat. They shouldn't have to hope nobody else can figure out what they're doing and sell it better than they can (which wouldn't be hard...inventors are as bad at marketing as markeeters are at invention). And hey, we developed the same thing at the same time, what a coinky-dink isn't an excuse -- if it were, there'd be less impetus to publish ideas, resulting in less knowledge. Anybody could read the journals and claim coincidental development. It's [cont]...

The most popular P2P software vendor is AOL, maker of AOL Instant Messenger which allows for direct file transfers between users of the service. It's important to keep in mind that the chairman of the FCC, Mike Powell, has a huge number of shares of AOL stock. So when you go after American P2P companies, you're going after Mike Powell's pocket, and in turn that means you're going to be invoking the wrath of Colin Powell.Like I said, not smart.By the way, did anyone know that Colin Powe [cont]...

Most of all, I would like to congratulate Apple on their fantastic use of the DMCA to crush free software developer writing applications (PlayFair) that can handle the formats in which they sell music. We like to commend such positive use of the DMCA here on Slashdot, so that perhaps more companies will start using the DMCA and attacking small developers!It is very important that companies like Apple help show the world that is completely possible to shove DRM down consumers throw [cont]...

Terrorism works. Terrorism causes fear, and the people whom terrorism works best on are those who fear the most and are most able to emphatize with victims. This has been aided by modern media, which is able to deliver maximum shock images instantly via a worldwide television network.I will be moderated down for saying this, but it's on-topic, it's factual, and it's my well reasoned opinion. Not good material for Slashdot, but my conscience dictates my actions.If we lived in a world of [cont]...

I used to work at a bookstore that occasionally sold controversial books. So let me tell you the difference between Christians and Muslems when it comes to sacrilege...When we sold Last Temptation of Christ, some Christians boycotted, some urged others to boycott, and some wrote letters to the newspapers. The author never had his life threatened. When we sold Satanic Verses, Muslems threatened us with bombings and death. The author of the book actually had to go into hiding, and is sti [cont]...

I'm concerned that in these times, the privacy advocates and other luddites just want to block any technological advances towards thwarting terrorists and other evildoers.They want to shackle law enforcement in the name of privacy. It's clear that 'privacy concerns' have become a catch-all to dismantle any tool that may be useful to government agencies. I'm not saying they can't be used for evil, harassing the innocent isn't what its primarily used for. Evoking 'Big Brother' at eve [cont]...

I am a windows developer of a small program with about 4000 users. Without spyware I would not be in business, since most people crack my s/w and dont pay after the trial.Thanks to spyware, I am still make a living.

Microsoft has decided not to rush a release just for the sake of releasing it. They want to get it right the first time. I congratulate them for doing the Right Thing and making sure they deliver a rock solid Service Pack for the millions of XP users out there.Before the slashdot editors and crowd crow over this delay, just remember the 503 errors and flakiness this site has experienced since maintenance was performed. Don't throw stones in glass houses, kids.

A lawyer posted on Yahoo to protect his reputation, was attacked by a bunch of faceless Anonymous Cowards, and is angry because he can't determine their identity because Yahoo's moderation system won't filter them out?Sounds like your typical Slashdot user.I think among the Slashdot crowd it's of course common knowledge that Yahoo deletes comments all the time, just full time staff with unlimited moderation power [slashdot.org] to instantly IP ban anyone who disagrees too much - but wh [cont]...

Why must Slashdot get all excited when a number like 5000 pops up? I don't understand why everyone is so excited about numbers. I took my 500th shit this month, you dont hear me calling the press do you?What about the 5001st book? Will that also yeild a news item?

Micro$oft gives out millions of dollars to catch people who exploit bugs in their browser! Now Linux gives out cash directly to people who find the bugs, rewarding engineers instead of snitches. I hope the major news outlets cover the huge difference in paradigm here- good cop instead of bad cop.Everyone failed my last Gmail invite challenge, and I'm up to three invites, so here's a new one: there are sixteen factual errors in this article [nytimes.com]. I'll give you one for free: Bus [cont]...

Gentlemen, the time has come for a serious discussion on whether ornot to continue using Perl for serious programming projects. As I willexplain, I feel that Perl needs to be retired, much the same way thatFortran, Cobol and Java have been. Furthermore, allow me to be so boldas to suggest a superior replacement to this outdated language.To give you a little background on this subject, I was recently askedto develop a client/server project on a Unix platform for a Fortune500 compan [cont]...

Not if your car is a webserver. That's like having a car with a big sign that says LOOK IN THE WINDOWS! THERE'S COOL STUFF INSIDE THIS CAR! Of course some people are bound to try the handle, at least to get a closer look. I attempt anonymous ftp logins and try/pub URLs on webservers all the time, as well as ascending to the parent directory and such. Sometimes I find some really neat stuff that way. I'm not about to attempt a root login, but, it's human nature [cont]...

I'm a google enginer in an unrelated department. I can shed light on what actully happened. While I could get fired, I want all Linux Zealots to take note.Zeitgeist has freqently been used by pragmatists to show that Linux is not redy for the desktop based on the user agents presented during a search. If it were ready, more people would send user agent Mozila/Linux. 1% of all browsers is below the margin of error.A common rasponse to Zeitgeist is that Linux users set there bro [cont]...

4AC, Awards:+2acct+1mod

We Want Negrodamus

An alert reader alerted us to this profoundly poor appraisal of the
iPod by Slashdot's preeminent portly prognosticator:

Unsurprisingly, he seems to be getting
called on itnow
and then. To be fair, hindsight is 20/20. Looking back, writing a
million reader site in an interpreted language probably wasn't the
best idea - it might scale poorly.

Apparently Rusty of the busted-bridge site has come to consensus
with CmdrTaco: k5 is a failure. Rusty's new bid for fame is a site
called "DailyKos", which is "untrollable" because they have an
ex-military administrator deleting accounts and posts in true Free
Republic style. An alert reader, however, points out that nothing
is impossible.

The Cathedral and the Bizarre

If Microsoft sometimes has obtuse development practices, it is
highly probable that they are merely learning
from the leader. With developers like that, who needs espionage?
[cache]

The 10th Circle

We think this journal entry
should be required reading for Slashdot moderators. Feel free to email
the admins and suggest that it be added to the moderator guidelines.

This July had some marvelous things to offer. Scantily clad young redheads!Stripping
schoolgirls! Slashbots, however, are far more
interested in arguing online - bad for them but GOOD FOR TROLLBACK! So
without further ado, the Trollback editorial staff is proud to present
our roundup for the month of July, 2004.

We've got Gmail!

For a solid gigabyte of righteous trolling
feedback, we've decided to go with Gmail.NET as our single-source
e-mail solutions provider. Give us a ring at
trollback@gmail.com!

Jews in Spaaaaaaaaaaace!

We have to tip our collective hat
to the ongoing efforts of Baldrson,
who got his tidy
little article about Spaceplane-2 posted to Slashdot's front page
this month. As with his other front page stories, Baldrson also
managed to get a link to his website included,
featuring enthusiastic information about rocketry, science, racial
superiority, the nonexistence of the Holocaust and some handy facts
about how killing the Jews is a great idea, along with that
fantastic mug shot. Congratulations go to Simoniker for upping
the Pagerank(tm)(R) of one of America's premier Neonazi crackpots.

Well here it is, this month's hand picked list of
links, scored by an arbitrary closed-source mechanism we call
Voodoo. Some of you may note that the number of direct replies to a
comment as reported by Trollback is wildly different than the count
reported in a user's comment summary. Is it whack? No, yuo. We've
hand-checked this anomoly a number of times now, and believe it or not
Slashdot's Perl scripts incorrectly count the number of direct
replies. It's true. Keep in mind we also discount replies by the
author of the post in question. We thought about reporting this bug
but the last guy to try that hasn't
gotten very far. In short: we're right, they're wrong, and
nothing's new! Slashdot dealt everyone a straight flush this month by
introducing a shit-flavored color scheme to match their content - and
we've tinted our List to match. Enjoy.

People choose, replied Hachamovitch (IE lead engineer). Hundreds of millions of people actively use Windows and they get to choose. Nothing in Windows as it ships keeps them from downloading other software that extends their browsing experience (e.g. the Google or Ebay toolbars) or changes it (e.g. an alternative browser).No they don't. Maybe I do, but I'm a computer expert.My mom certainly has no clue that there even IS anything other than IE to use. Most of our mothers probably don [cont]...

Note that this does not mean that they are replacing IE with FireFox. Good, cause firefox has render problems on slashdot all the time (where as IE doesn't). I don't think its firefox, either, cause it doesn't happen on any other site I go to.

We humans aren't going to have any immunity to these microbes that have been isolated for 500000 years. I hope whoever's studying these lakes takes appropriate precautions against both accidental release and theft by terrorist organizations.

10AC, Awards:+68acct+1bust+1bab+30mod

171|(3,34,62,18%)Real Troll Talk | "This is great because it's Google"

Nothing was greater than when Google bought out Delphi and took over the largest USENET archive of all-time.Google always does things the right way without ruining the user experience or their wallets.In Google We Trust...(P.S. I have three Gmail invites anyone up for one -- I already gave away 5 to friends/family?)

i don't see what the problem is. there haven't been any cases of abuse. if you don't want to be spied upon, then don't do suspicious things. how has the patriot act directly affected you?

31AC, Awards:+43acct+1bust+2low+1acup+15mod

128|(5,17,48,6%)circletimessquare | "i didn't like the demonization of fusion"

i liked the movie, but i did not like the demonization of fusion in spider man iiin a world of smog and wars fought over oil prices (pro-iraq war people: read why iraq invaded kuwait, anti-iraq war people: read why us invaded iraq) we do not need an ultra-pop movie demonizing one of the few technologies which could save us from the petroleum agein spider man ii, fusion can go chernobyl, this is a fallacyif something goes wrong with a fusion reaction, it just fizzles out, it can NE [cont]...

Really, is only naked women or men. In Mozilla Firebird, I have setted it to Block images from goat.cx (not visit!) and if my kids pictures of naked people find, fine. I did as child. I run linux but don't need this. As friend said You Americans are so puritanical!

Mod me down as troll, but I'm about to speak the truth. Ubiquitous surveillance? There are cameras covering every inch of the city I walk in. Massive government analysis? A huge database called MATRIX contains all my financial and medical records, searchable by federal agents. I have to give my SSN, despite the law, to every two-bit huckster who asks for it, to buy a house, a car, a plane ticket, you name it.And you know what? I don't care. Because I've made a choice to deal with this [cont]...

Here's a brief explanation for beginners of Tolkien's mythology and worldscape: Q: Is LoTR really based on Christian Mythology?A: Yes. Tolkien wanted to demonstrate that even the mentally and physically challenged were capable of success and that therefore we should love everyone, regardless of their defects.Q: So who represents the mentally and physically challenged?A: Well obviously the hobbits are the physically challenged ones here, but the central mentally challenged figure i [cont]...

I have gentoo on my computer. You might think this is good, but its bad. My ex-boyfriend was a big gentoo-lover, in fact he was a developer for it or something. But now he's left me, and all that's left of him are some books and the impact he made on my computer.I would love to be able to use linux more, I am taking a course in community college and my boyfriend was wonderful for helping me out with that but when I told him that I hated him developing for gentoo all the time (he even f [cont]...

17AC, Awards:+10acct+5mod

55|(1,9,23,2%)Sheetrock | "Space science isn't something you can do in a jar."

I was just thinking about this today during my ruminescing aboutthe crazy and sometimes haphazard ways in which spaceflight and NASA has returned benefits to our society against adversity from folks not unlike Van Allen. In it's own way, this is comparable to the battleagainst entrenched interests that new theories must undergo beforethey become the accepted norm.Take, for example, the struggle of Galileo against the church topermit society to recognize the fact that the world is roun [cont]...

Its an aircraft with a rocket motor attached. Real spaceships can't use wings to slow themselves down and manuouveaure because there is no air to do it in! I'm sorry if I sound churlish but this whole enterprise to me smacks more of someones ego than anything practical. When they've solved the problems of manourveuring in a vacuum , long duration human life support (an O2 cylinder doesn't really count) , proper re-entry from near orbital speeds (which are required for any useful f [cont]...

I have no idea why people who haven't even read the legislation keep making comments that are plain incorrect. The only time reverse engineering is illegal under the DMCA is when it is used for making infringing copies.

I've been watching this whole thing unfold for some time now and paid attention to the overtures Real was making to Apple some time ago. Basically issue here is that the folks who designed the iPod and the iTunes music store really cared about the music, whereas Real is concerned with making money by delivering media rather than caring anything about the media per se. Let me repeat that for the folks at Real........It's about the music.

In 1996, he developed a solar-powered pump powerful enough to lift water from wells up to 20 metres deep. His invention is widely used in his home province of Wardak and the neighbouring province of Logar as well.One atmosphere of pressure is about 10 meters of water. You can't pump water any higher than that. I smell exaggeration.

Just kill some muslims and take their oil! They'll only use it for terrorism anyway!I'm pretty sure the parent post was meant as a joke, but this is actually a serious business. The reason for this guy's adventure, and other adventures into alternative energy sources, is very real: Prince Bandar and his Saudi friends are currently in control of America via a proxy named George Bush. If you've seen Farenheit 9/11 you know what I'm talking about. At last night's convention John Kerry add [cont]...

Great, now we have yet another form of weapon of mass destruction. Terrorists could cook up a batch of prions and dump it in a water or food supply, thus killing off lots of people a short period of time later. Ahh, the miracles of modern science.

You know what really irritates me these days is the sheer pomposity of the name SpaceShip One. Hello? It's not a spaceship. It's an airplane. They did not even get close to entering orbit. They have done nothing to solve the re-entry problem. It's an (ugly-looking) airplane with a rocket strapped to the back that can't even take off on its own power.So why is Burt Rutan suddenly the go-to guy for all things space-related - what's he going to do, drop payloads off in the high atmos [cont]...

Personally, I download Open Source software. Warez and Crackz are great for teenagers, but I don't really have time or energy for this stuff. If an Open Source piece of software does the job, I'll use it. If only a commerical piece of software does the job, I'll buy it. Unfortuately for software makers, I'm buying less and less. Either the product has to be REALLY good, or it has to do something no other product does. e.g. My last few purchases were WMA Recorder, PalmBasket, and Budget [cont]...

It's been almost two months since graduation, and I'm still living on campus, by myself, in a hundred twenty square foot single. I haven't left the building in more than three weeks. Perhaps the Chinese delivery place will wonder why I stopped calling. More likely, they won't even notice, and wouldn't care if they did. My so-called friends packed up and left without saying goodbye, and the only phone call I've answered since then was a wrong number; the other party hung up immedia [cont]...

We've tried deploying BOINC before for distributed biologic research on our internal workstations to create an informal cluster of sorts, with dissatisfying results. While BOINC is considered the provolone cheese of the distributed computing industry, we found that it behaves in a somewhat inconsistent manner.For one thing, on most of the workstations BOINC would appear to work very quickly on the data only to crash out well before the computation was created. Indeed, sometimes it wo [cont]...

Government can't switch to Linux or even free software, people say. Well, such has done München (Munich you say) here in my country. I am professional involved with some of people who are with the project involved, and it is as they are accorded going smooth move, exlax as you Americans say.

There are sadly many ways to get around GPL. One being the method they use by offering to ship the source only. This can be done in many different shapes to get around anything. You simply charge an irrate fee for packaging, documentation, or something of the sort. There are a few liscences that will not allow this, sadly they are not widely used.

Part of the secret to the success of the Internet is in allowing unfettered communication between endpoints. While I am to some degree concerned about the technical approach to solving the spam problem, because of the collateral consequences it may have, it does not raise the spectre of 1st Amendment violation that anti-spam legislation does.That Microsoft is taking part is to their credit. Finally the Internet at large is going to actually try to apply a solution to spam at the sour [cont]...

Cool, all the old geeks. I shall admit that I've always been sympathetic to the cause of the good hackers who fight for freedom of speach and all these liberties, many of your ancestors had died for...But on the other side, I wonder where is now and for them the border of what is allowed and what is not. Is this hackers ethics they define something too murky or it is non-existing at all? How do we prevent the proceedings about the Distributed Password Cracking API from their confe [cont]...

Sometimes trolls feel that they serve a community purpose,
by shaking things up, stirring up discussion, playing the
DevilsAdvocate, by being the CourtJesters, but they really
aren't. They are a perversion of all those purposes.

In
short, folks, you'd be better off if editor moderation on Slashdot
was still a secret. For our part, we're pretty impressed that
a site which encourages ignoring trolls has devoted nearly an entire
book to the subject of trolls.

Update: Trollback investigates. This cache appears to show that OverlordQ was a Slashdot subscriber as of May, 2004, predating this comment (which includes a link to subscribe). We find this highly inconclusive, not to mention insulting - giving money to Rob Malda is totally unacceptable - but as always, the final decision belongs to our dear readers. HTH, HAND.

Is it real? Is it
a plane? Is it a French Fraud or a Freedom Swindle? Trollback isn't
taking bets, but we'd totally fail it if we didn't mention Michael's
dangerous liasons with a very shady weblog and its assertion that the
escrow paramid built on the "Jackito TDA" is too legit to
quit. It's a
fraud!. No
it's not!. Yes it
is! Huh? They've posted a low resolution movie of an oversize
grayscale mockup prototype of the device, and that's proof enough for
us.

The "Moon": A Ridiculous Liberal Myth

It's true. Now
you and other god-fearing Americans can fight back with this commemorative
T-shirt. Let's see how those gun grabbers like it when we blow
their observation platform clear out of the sky.

Slashdot Gold!

For this month's blast from the past, we
thought we'd rally the party faithful with one of the best documented
examples of outright lying from Slashteam. Jamie McCarthy used his
iron wit to lay the smack down with a fearsome Simpsons
reference a few years back when denying
that he wrote the censorware code in Slash. You doubt the Trollback? Check
the author of comments.pl(line
522), the portion of Slashcode that halts posting based on some
very questionable "math". But is it Censorware? Jamie confirms it - Censorware!!

Lifetime Achievement Award

While Mike Miller is certainly on the
road to greatness in trolling, it's well past time we
honored Michael Moore for a lifetime of successful trolling. Fat,
ugly, and wildly rich, Moore's romp past $100 million in bites shows a
rich flair for capitalism, karma whoring and specious
reasoning. Without even mentioning brand
name biters such as Guiliani, we feel pretty safe in saying that
Michael's Voodoo is permanently off the map. In his recent book,
"Stupid White Men", Moore asserted that because of the assymetrical
opportunity structure in place in America he would never hire anyone
who wasn't black ever again. We're not entirely sure, but Trollback
suspects that this marked the birth of the GNAA.

I, HBT

A monumental work of trolling hit the box office this
weekend as director Alex Proyas released his Isaac Asimov "adaptation"
to the enjoyment of ignorant buffoons
nationwide. Asimov spent his entire lifetime creating a world of
fiction in which robots were not the dystopic, soulless horrors of his
contemporaries but rather a failsafe, harmless aid to mankind. Since
Asimov had invested forty years of his life facing off against literary
technophobia, Proyas saw fit to honor him with a movie based on
Asimov's books in which evil, murderous robots controlled by a central
hive-mind engage in a terrifying quest to enslave mankind. Released to
general acclaim and the muted background death-shriek of Asimov
fanboys everywhere, Proyas's feat establishes him as the newest Fresh
Prince of Hollywood trolling. Well done, Alex.

A license to steal

You've made it to the end of Trollback!
For our faithful readers, we have a gift. Ever tried to read the
darling magazine of granola munchers everywhere, Salon, but been stopped short by their
draconian money-grubbing subscription scheme? Trollback has no idea
how a communist magazine like Salon could be so craven as to attempt
such a capitalist undertaking, but we intend to set them straight. Right then: http://www.salon.com/news/cookie.html. Visiting
that URL gives you the "free day pass" cookie, opening all content on the site for 24 hours if you accept the cookie. Three cheers for bad web design! Four cheers
for Trollback!

You may notice some formatting
changes this month; someone yelled rotate and we all switched
desks. This month marks the return of Voodoo, our answer to
Karma and a numerical approximation of just how black your magic truly
is. Here's a breakdown of the new scheme:

The story percentage is
the fraction of comments in the story which are nested under the
linked comment. If you managed to Parent 50% of the discussion in the
story, you'll see 50% here, and your Voodoo score will reflect
this. Voodoo is also influenced by the +awards section, which we
decline to further elaborate on. Our system for measuring Voodoo must
not fall into the hands of crack reverse engineers such as Jamie
McCarthy (played brilliantly by Ben Affleck) so for deciphering this
section, you're on your own. Suffice it to say that every factor
available is taken into account.Note: Voodoo is calculated from a
browser-cached version of the page, not by scripted interaction with
the site. That means that late replies may be missed by our scoring
system. Complaints? Let us know what you think of the new
system by voting
in our poll.

Flamewar 9/11

As we noted in last month's issue, class C
subnet bans are in effect for anyone whose posts consist of "Bad
Behavior". What is "Bad Behavior"? Well according to pudge, anyone who
asks is a "doo doo
head" [sic]. Trollback decided to fact check pudge's assertion:

Unsurprisingly,
pudge has no idea what he's talking about. So what exactly is
"Bad Behavior" on Slashdot? Turns out, "Bad Behavior" means, among
other things, being a Republican, not entirely trusting Michael Moore,
or asserting that self-described Op-Eds are Op-Eds. This is made
abundantly clear in the most deliberate (and successful) troll of the
month.

CmdrTaco decided that this month, "News for Nerds" included reviewing
a highly charged political movie and noting that it "speaks much
truth", on the front page. This is the guy who won't post stories on
Slashdot about Slashdot because it's not "News for
Nerds". This 3200+ comment flamefest generated all the histrionics
you'd expect, with one interesting caveat: anyone who questioned
Moore's impartiality was moderated Troll, and thereby subnet banned
from the site. This is, in a nutshell, the very definition of
"Bad Behavior" - disagreeing with CmdrTaco's politics. To quote from
their beloved FAQ:

"The Slashdot
Editors have unlimited mod points, and we have no problem using
them."

Now click on the
F911 story. You will basically only be reading Republican points
of view now; these are the only people who got moderated down. In a
story which was basically an open invitation to political discussion,
with a highly polarized electorate, the political faction that agreed
with the editors was moderated up, while the political faction that
disagreed, no
matter how calmly presented, was moderated Troll/Flamebait
and banned from posting to the site. And moderation is anonymous, so
we'll never know who did it.

Now and then trollback gets email
from people who don't understand why we publish our magazine. We
don't want to come down on either side of the F-911 debate
(except perhaps to say that we consider Mr. Moore living proof that
you can troll for a living) but we do think that trying to use
Perl to silence your political opposition might not be Fair &
Balanced. Blatant flamebait posted as a story? Your political
opposition moderated out of sight and IP blocked from posting? And
remember, it's not
censorship!Vive le resistance!

Bonch got his review
of Spiderman 2
posted to the front page of Slashdot, the only comment being "Thanks
to bonch for this review". Sadly no one remembered to thank Google for
not being consulted, as this review had been written and posted the
day before at Chud.com. As legions
of Slashbots
began to moan about the plagiarism, the story stayed unedited on the
front page until it reached the very bottom, at which point a
retraction was posted. Bonch wins Trollback's Bayesian Filter Food
Award this month, proving once again what an effective
anti-trolling tool a Bayes filter would be.

I can watch ICANNWATCH

Near and dear to our hearts is
ICANNWATCH, a Slash-based site devoted to meticulously monitoring
ICANN for signs of abuse. Now, we love an Internet crank as much as
anybody, but unlike Slashdot, we're pretty sure that ICANN's ethics
are unassailable. Nevertheless, it seems they've got a problem over
there with something called "Anonymous Posting". Switch
to -1 Nested to see some of the best...

Sheetrock 2 Reviewed

Yes it's true, Sheetrock is
back. Posting from behind enemy subnet lines, you'll note he found
a way to keep his powder dry and make an appearance in this month's
List.

What I'd like to know is, what kind of tactical advantage does a railgun bring? Sure, it can hit a target some 200+ miles out, but so can a missile. Missiles also have the advantage of being self-guided. All this thing is, is a way to build a more powerful battleship. And yet, the U.S. has put all of its Battleships on active reserve. In their place, they've been deploying missile carriers at a lower cost and higher degree of flexibility.In short, what does the railgun bring to a Real [cont]...

A key benefit of the e-Plate is that the tag provides an encrypted and secure ID code which is registered in the UK Ministry of Transport's vehicle database. This code prevents tampering, cloning, or other forms of fraud that can currently happen with camera-based systems. Additionally, the e-Plate is designed to shatter if anyone tries to remove or otherwise tamper with it, and the tag can be programmed to transmit a warning if any attempt is made to dislodge the plate. They said tha [cont]...

159|(5,29,73,10%)Anonymous Coward | "This is another reason why C should be deprecated"

Gentlemen, the time has come for a serious discussion on whether or not to continue using C for serious programming projects. As I will explain, I feel that C needs to be retired, much the same way that Fortran, Cobol and Perl have been. Furthermore, allow me to be so bold as to suggest a superior replacement to this outdated language.To give you a little background on this subject, I was recently asked to develop a client/server project on a Unix platform for a Fortune 500 compan [cont]...

But an F/OSS hacker has taken a company's proprietary work and made it available for free, even giving it a similar name.Why is this a good thing?If F/OSS developers want to speed up Linux, the corporate environment is where they should be looking. By doing this they have enabled corporations to get something for free which could cause a company (and a lot of potential Linux users) to go out of business.How are the developers supposed to feed their children if they're unemployed? [cont]...

While the iPos looks nice, and admittedly has the best interface of all the MP3 players (owing to the simple design Macintosh has become a master of), is it worth dropping a couple hundred on it? I've heard of two design flaws now -- both of which they seem less than inclined to fix beyond a short period of ownership -- and have noticed that PDAs in a similar price range can do MP3, video, and even word processing. If it was reliable I'd buy one tomorrow, but are they yet? [cont]...

Java Faster Than C++?No, it isn't. It's much slower.I wrote a program that simply counts to 10000 and then quits. Time from double-clicking the icon until when the program exits: C++: 0.5 secondsJava: 20 seconds How hard is that?

...is to hire a good lawyer. Hint: a lawyer who advises you to settle when you have done nothing wrong is not a good lawyer. Most lawyers are too lazy to take cases that they do not understand, which explains why so many tech-related cases wind up costing the protagonist money. This is even worse in the criminal law arena, because these lazy attorneys can cost an innocent man his freedom. IMHO there is no excuse for this, but it happens every day. Case in point: my roommate [cont]...

My reading of the bill is that the law would not overturn Betamax so much as explicitly prevent Betamax from being applied to digital media. Betamax and VHS were both analog formats with cumulative degradation, that is, a copy of a copy was degraded, and at enough generations the quality would be unusable. Perfect digital copies, however, do not have this limitation, and it is merely common sense that they should be covered by a different law. Betamax was a Supreme Court decision, and [cont]...

Despite the first amendment, there are restrictions on what you can say in America. Now, I understand that this bill is not worded as well as it could have been. A sensible restriction would be self-classification of pornographers into a.XXX TLD, with jail time and other punishments only for those who attempt to sneak into.COM and others. This would allow respectable ISPs such as AOL to block all pornographers simply by blocking [cont]...

Faster importantless? With 64 bit processing power for all available by athlon 64 made available that works with 64 bit yes immdiately we would switch. These chip make futiliity. Why make processors of like these new when you can improve on 64 bit? The battle is to will be lost to Athlon without 64 bit competition by.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=architect : 1. One who designs and supervises the construction of buildings or other large structures.2. One that plans or devises: a country considered to be the chief architect of war in the Middle East.I mean, it's not even a second meaning. It's just plain English abuse. I hope this Zdziarski guy's paper is decent, since he's pretty tripped my spam filter from the gate.

The passing lane is for passing, and the law of the passing lane is this: Slower Traffic Always Yields To Overtaking Traffic. She couldn't pass you, because overtaking on the right is illegal. By blocking the passing lane, you've gone ahead and blocked the entire freeway to anyone who obeys the law.You were in the wrong, she did the right thing. If it were me, I'd have shot you.FYI.

I am for cannot waiting able frequency to this have! I too am so greatness compression going to get. I am ask: can use this games? UT2k4 is good. It is very big game however maybe some for people. Can this technology fast enough for gaming be?

This brings up a complaint I've got with the way the industry works nowadays.

As a programmer, I feel the continual march of progress in computing has beenhampered as of late because of a major misconception in some segments of thesoftware industry. Some would argue that the process of refinement byiterative design, which is the subject of many texts in the field -- extremeprogramming being the most recent -- demonstrates that applying the theory ofevolution to coding is the most ef [cont]...

BMW parts are much harder to fence, as car thieves steal cars for their parts, and the market is entirely an economy of scale. The more popular a car, the more the car is worth. Which is why BMW has never made the most stolen car list [cnn.com]. The parts to a Honda Accord, for instance, are worth a lot more and are easier to sell.Of course, stealing an iPod from a BMW doesn't mean you have to steal the whole car, just smash the window. This will be a huge boon to radio thieves, as the [cont]...

I wonder if they have plans to move this into other, higher quality vehicles in the future? While I admit that BMW's are very expensive and prestigous, independent car reviews like Consumer Reports always give them the lowest possible marks for reliability, a key indicator of quality. Any chance they're going to port this to high quality makes such as Nissan, Honda or (the king of reliability) Toyota?Before anyone flames me -1 Troll or something, here's a link [consumerreports.org] to [cont]...

Steve Wozniack's son and I got in a fight at a Jack-In-The-Box in Los Gatos, California last year. He told me to go back to Iraq (I have brown skin color).I would have kicked the shit out of him but he had a bunch of his buddies from Los Gatos High there and I only had a couple friends with me. The cops showed up really soon so it was all over anyway.

8AC, Awards:+4acct+4mod

OSnews: Hotbed of Agreement

OSnews, a highly moderated
forum, is pretty much troll-proof. We think. On the other hand, there
might be some exceptions. An alert reader has sent in the following
links:

If TrollBack seems a little late to you, please understand that the best things in
life take time.
When was the last time you saw Quickies?
Exactly.

Please remember that the TrollBack team welcomes guest editors and content. Send us an email if you're interested in helping.

As the Greatest Generation finally gets a Memorial in Washington D.C., we
here at TrollBack find ourselves mourning the passing of fallen comrades.
Cmdr Stalin has passed a new subnet banning decree, signalling the end of
such greats as
SCO$699FeeTroll.
Slashdot trolls will rise from the ashes of fascism to circumvent their subnet bans
and post again.

(Ban)-ana Monkeys

The IP ban code has been given a new set of very sharp teeth, causing
many everyday Slashdot users to get IP banned. Most of these people
will just quietly leave, but a small fraction are figuring out that
they can still post journal entries on the subject. Here's a small
sampler:

illuminata:
'I can't post because of too many negative moderations that were done by some
people who don't like what I have to say.'

October_30th:
'This must be the longest ban I've ever been subjected to. A week or so short of a
month already.'

Mirko: 'So, here's
the deal : I will deactivate the Slashdot ad blocker (do you really
sell stuff to Swiss people, anyway ?!) until I can post
again.'

To follow this up, we have a priceless response
in which the Swiss guy's grammar is mocked. Yes, Slashdot
mocked someone else's use of English - a foreign national, to boot.
We just can't make this stuff up: 'We will get back to you when we are
done "Thinking of it."'

YAJoe:
'According to Slashdot, my IP address has had several bad posts and
therefore I cannot post again. To them, I am a bad egg.'

monstroyer:
'Slashdot took a page from the entertainment industry and banned this account
because I have too much karma and paid a subscriber bonus. Now
that's service!'

pluvius:
'I just noticed that I'm no longer able to post anonymously because of
"excessive bad posting on my subnet or IP."'

Cyrax:
'im reading a article decide to post a comment and boom i get this
crap "Due to excessive bad posting..."'

Bajanman:
'Well, it looks like I'm blocked for good here at slashdot.org.'

Benna:
'It was a perfectly reasoned opinion and certainly not a troll.
I thought slashdot stood for free speech but apperently not.'

These are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg: you can find
more
diaries on the topic.

If you're an unaffiliated, non-trolling Slashbot who got banned for
posting something truthful about Microsoft, the DMCA, or any other
Kool-Aid laden topic at Slashdot, take a moment to share your story in
the comments of this diary. For those who are wondering how the new IP ban
code works, it's just a simple change to an old system. Basically if
you get moderated down by any moderator, they put a posting ban on the
entire class C network you posted from, and if it happens more than
once, the ban can last for months. Many people who are angry at 'the
jerk on my network who got me banned' are unaware that the 'jerk' is
probably them. Look in your history: do you have a single post
at -1? That's probably why you can't post.

Some of you may be thinking "you mean I can ban an entire dorm of
nerds, or my company, or an entire cable modem block, just by posting
goatse links a few times?". The answer, in short, is yes.
Troublemakers have been handed a new form of troublemaking: just
visit a network with a lot of Slashdot users, go on an anonymous posting
spree, and you can get them shipped off to Gauntanamo for months.
If you're intending to use a proxy to get its subnet banned, please be
aware that they don't
proxy
scan you if you post logged in, so use a fresh account.

In other news, we can finally tell (sometimes) when editors are
moderating a story. Moderators can now moderate posts down from -1 to
-1 (-1 + -1 = -1, Slashdot math, etc). This allows the editors to put
IP bans on users posting at -1.
Here's coverage,
and here's a race
condition in Slashcode.

Robbie the Slashbot

After careful consideration, we here at Trollback have decided on a new
Mascot: Robbie the
Slashbot, pictured upper right. Robbie won out because despite his
total lack of a brain, he's managed to get his right arm in the air
for a healthy Sig Heil. Robbie knows that BSD isn't dying, Linux is
the best operating system and Osama bin Laden was probably a freedom
fighter.
Welcome, Robbie! Here at Slashdot, you're among friends. Lots of them.

Let's take a stroll down amnesia lane.
In June of 2003, Hemos & CmdrTaco settled down with a few mixed drinks and a keyboard to
discuss Slashdot on IRC.
When a Slashdot reader asked what they thought of the Wiki concept, they had this to say:

<Questions> erigol asks: Have you considered setting up a slashdot Wiki, since Wiki's are, like, the rage, and stuff.
<CmdrTaco> Wiki is silly. Not scalalble.
<hemos> Wiki's make me want to guage my eyes out.
<hemos> gouge, even.
<CmdrTaco> They're fun for small groups.
<hemos> No, I like the idea.
<CmdrTaco> Slashdot is for millions.
<hemos> And yeah, for smaller groups is great.
<hemos> But we spent the 3 years scaling up to this level of users
<CmdrTaco> Thats the thing that people don't understand

Strangely, just 6 months later, a site called
Wikipediablew by Slashdot
so fast that it nearly knocked them off the Internet, utilizing only unscaleable
Wiki technology. As Slashdot continues to decline, Wikipedia now has nearly doubled
Slashdot's Alexa traffic ranking. Strangely in only a few years, a site not for
millions blew millions past a site for millions. Pretty confusing, even to a Slashbot.
Trollback has not yet learned how this amazing event took place, but we encourage you
to write CmdrTaco to find out.

Welcome to TrollBack for April 2004. April started off rather slowly, with The List picking up a number of the
strongest submissions in the last few days.
We'd like to welcome USAPatriot to TrollBack.
TrollBack regrettably did not see any posts that were made last month by
this user, although if we had we would have had these posts
[1,
2,
3] in The List.

TrollBack would like to welcome back
b.foster and
Lover's Arrival,
The to TrollBack; it has been far too long between posts for these two
legends, and we hope to see more material for next month's issue.
Thanks to some fan-whoring last month by an anonymous TrollBack fan, we
have a number of new readers that we'd like to welcome.

Answering the Mail Bag

We had a few emails in the past month we'd like to take some time to
answer.
The letters have been edited slightly.

Letter #1: Encyclopedia Article on Slashdot Trolling

As someone who reads (and infrequently writes for) the Wikipedia
(1),
but regularly reads Slashdot, I feel you are a rather respected
(wellknown at least) part of our community which is covered quite
extensively in the Wikipedia under "Slashdot"
(2), "Slashdot subculture"
(3), and
"Slashdot trolling phenomena"
(4).
What this is only lacking is any real mention of you. You can directly
contribute any information about yourself into the articles using the
"Edit this Page" links on the pages. I'm in no way affiliated with the
management of the wikipedia, but I feel that the article(s) could stand to
benefit from additional information regarding your work.

Regards,

Thank you for your letter. We notice that link 4 is a 'featured article
candidate' on Wikipedia, which presumably means it will make the next
edition of Brittanica.
We'd like to suggest that the wikipedia definition of the
Slashdot Troll 'community' is quite different to the what many of the
purist trolls might define.
For something a little more grounded in history, TrollBack suggests
the following reading materials as a starting point on any wikipedia
definition:
The Slashdot Troll FAQs written by
spiralx,
jsm,
and an
Anonymous
Coward.

As far as a mention for TrollBack goes, perhaps something along the lines
of being Slashdot's best known alternative publication.
The TrollBack team likes to think they have made a positive contribution
to the community, particularly in recording moments that might otherwise
be lost and forgotten about as the drudgery of Slashdot's normal programming
continues.

Letter #2: Dear TrollBack

Dear TrollBack,

I tried to follow Pan T. Hose's posting this month. Unfortunately my
favorite Mensa Babe, PhysicsGenius, tps12, Professor Collins, Amsterdam
Vallon and Boromir son of Faram haven't posted anything this month (oh
God, how I miss them!), so I've got only links to Pan T. Hose's texts.
(I've read lots of great comments by ObviousGuy lately but I haven't
saved the links.) So here are my favorite ones, some of which you might
consider including in the next issue of TrollBack.

Thank you for your letter. TrollBack misses these accounts as well, and
if the account holders are reading, perhaps they might consider a come
back. It should be noted that Boromir son of Faram is tps12's follow-on
account. tps12 stopped posting when he had 1337 comments to his name.
TrollBack would also like to backup this letter's mention of ObviousGuy.
ObviousGuy has been carrying TrollBack for a few publications now, and
it is appreciated.

Elsewhere

Over at Kuro5hin, the proverbial hit the fan in a major way in April.
It seems accurate to suggest that in the past few months, K5 has been
chock full of meta-wankery and whining about so-called crapflooders.
Rusty
pulled the
plug on new account creation and anonymised any account that posted
a photo-shopped photo involving his wife.

As could be expected when you're the recipient of whining and bitching,
Rusty kept a low profile.
So the site with the highest meta-overhead of any popular nerd site
saw an article titled
'Where is Rusty?'
voted up rapidly to the front-page.
Momochrome summed the whole situation up in a
single
comment that turned the tables back on those who have created the most
noise of late.

A fair amount of anguish has been expressed over the lack of a comment search
feature in scoop that worked well. In this very story, localroger
suggested
that the answer to scoop's comment searching was to generate a flat file that
consisted of all words that had been posted in all comments to date, with
comment ids associated with each instance of said word.
In order to ensure this superb search strategy ran as fast as possible,
it was to be implemented using assembly language.
At that stage of events, localroger was completely serious about it.

Realising he had been cut to pieces, localroger decided that he'd try and
get some credibility back with a follow-on story,
this time as
a troll.
That story got voted to section. Shortly after the story got section,
localroger posted a
diary
where he bragged about his brilliance.
Shoeboy's
comment sums localroger up in a few short sentences.

Slashdot Math

As reported first in 31337, slashdot math struck
again this month, with a comment that is 30% Underrated + 20%
Insightful + 20% Interesting == +5 Funny.
As 31337 gets flushed of old posts, we think we should preserve some
of the most insightful meta-commentary ever seen:

Could the figure be made less helpful?

One possibility might be to eliminate 'Score:' as a number entirely
and instead represent it with a smudge of color made up of smudges of
various colors as chosen by the moderators.

This brings with it a multitude of advantages, not the least of which
is the reduction of the point modifier system for mod attributes (such
as 'Interesting') to a color wheel, but also the potential to alienate
the colorblind portion of the community. Best of all, if the new
moderation system follows a subtractive color mixing model most
comments will be rated 'brownish', which coincides quite nicely with
my online experiences and posting history.

There's been a lot of change to the moderation system of late. Many of
you may have noticed that being moderated up as Funny doesn't raise
your Karma. This means that a post that 100 moderators think is Funny
and 100 moderators think is Overrated will bounce between 4 and 5 100
times, lowering your karma by one each time.
The result? In one post you can go from +50 (Excellent) to
-50 (Terrible). This is progress. +1 Funny is now a weapon.
There's also a huge penalty to anyone whose post is first
moderated up a bunch, then moderated down a bunch. This happens most
often when people point out spelling errors in stories; later, the
spelling error is fixed by editors and the original poster is
moderated down. So you lose 50 karma because you helped an editor fix
a spelling mistake. You've also lost a bundle of moderation
tokens.

CmdrTaco has had a busy month by all indications, given a recent spate
of journal activity. In between his attempts to purchase a high
resolution Tivo to see bad television more perfectly defined, he's
been sharing a lot of his brainstorming about how to "fix" that which
he considers not broken: The Moderation System. Some of you who have
been following the story for years may recognise many of his new
insights as your own comments, shot down years ago by Rob as items
that "won't scale" and resurrected as innovations on his
yellow legal pad.
There's talk
of bringing back trusted moderators (though this time his AI will do the
selection for him, no blacklist required), talk of de-gaming the system
by removing all the
scores, and a small trickle of two-year-old "unscaleable" common
sense lifted straight from user feedback to the Post of Doom.

Finally,
it has been proposed
that Slashcode could use Bayesian Filtering to identify troll posts on
slashdot.
We'd like to help the slashteam waste their time by identifying trolling
legends to feed into the filter.
This month's nominee is Sheetrock, truly a Slashdot icon.

Bayesian Filter Food Award

TrollBack would like to present a special tribute to TrollBack regular
Sheetrock, who never ceases to amaze the team with the quality of posts
made.
TrollBack has featured 30 posts by Sheetrock in the previous 13 editions
of Trollback.
The decision to confer an inaugural award to Sheetrock came with
this
post, which shall forever be known as the "Great Wall of China through
Japan" post.
TrollBack will now provide a short review of 5 select posts that we love,
and we're sure you will too.

When TrollBack nearly folded a distant 15 months ago, Sheetrock wrote a
moving
eulogy,
and a special place in TrollBack's heart for Sheetrock was found.
The award's prize is a permanent listing in TrollBack's friends section.
A round of applause for this gentleman, please, and an acceptance speech
if you're reading, Sheetrock.

Finally, we'd like to take you back down amnesia lane.
This month, we feature the infamous Shoeboy vs Merlyn episode that took
place on slashdot back in April 2001.

Merlyn is a 'perl monk', which means he is a perl expert and likes to
engage in relations with camels.
Merlyn had been fired and taken through the courts by Intel, after it
caught him cracking passwords in a self-appointed security review without
authorisation to do so.
Slashdot featured a story about how he had been taken to the cleaners and
lost an
appeal.
You'd think that being a master of password security, you'd set your
slashdot password to something half reasonable. Apparently not.

In a crushing
irony, his slashdot account password at that time was "slashdot" and was
guessed by
Shoeboy.
Shoeboy had a fetish (and probably still does) for Larry Wall's daughter,
and proceeded to make a
fewposts as
Merlyn saying that having become a criminal, he'd never be able to settle
down with Heidi an lead a peaceful life.

That's right, assmasters, it is that onespecialtime
of year when the
slashdot front-page consists entirely of one tired lame gag after another.
Luckily, the Trollback team have put together another issue of your
favourite publication.

April fools is a bizarre day on slashdot. It is just about the only time
you'll find an editor post a
story suggesting that
ESR is full of hot air.
Sadly, they stop short of suggesting that
ESR is an arrogant gas baron.
Surely that is the most on-topic discussion
to be had on April 1.

The List is chock full of funny gags this issue; perhaps Trollback is front-page material?

Harvard is the new Mensa

The mensa line has been used to great effect by trolling legends
Krapangor and
Mensa Babe.
Slashbots just hate elitism, even if it is central to their open source
zealotry.
Trollback is proud to provide you with the complete posting history of the
Harvard character that some of you may have seen posting during March.

The character actually started out rather slowly
back in
February, but had a
great
outing at the beginning of March, which is featured in The List.
The next outing was a re-post of the February post, but this time it had
success.
It was at this time when the character was corrected: Harvard refers
to its Teaching Assistants as
Teaching
Fellows.

The early success brought laziness as the Harvard poster took a turn for the
weeds
[1,
2,
3] -
although there were always good bites to be had.
The poster was quickly back on the spoke though, with
a comment
making unfounded accusations against unfounded accusations that had a
good bite
from the article's submitter and even a joke about Harvard
wankers.
This was followed up with another entry in The List, discussing why
Qt is not
his favorite toolkit.

With all the negative feedback our intrepid poster from Harvard had
received, he felt a bit depressed, and wanted to know why was he
not liked.
He wanted to recommend that other people did not make the same mistake
one of his students did when the student tried to
write a
BIOS based on Debian Linux. He also did his best
Dan Quayle
impression.

If anything is true about the Slashbot, it is the hatred they have for Windows
and Microsoft, despite doing all they can to create a clone operating system.
This month saw an attack led by the crapflooder
users.pl, posting
early
into many stories to get the user
windows in lots of foe lists.
The writeup in windows' journal tells the sad story of what has happened
so far.

Elsewhere

Over at K5, the user
IndianaTroll
has been keeping a record of interesting events on K5 that are troll-related
in his diary.
We applaud the effort made my IndianaTroll to keep a record of these events;
the team has registered TrollBack on K5, but we feel the
quality of K5 trolls is lacking except for the right wing maniacs
Ray Megard,
Adam Rightmann,
and sellison.
We'd like to pay special mention to Ray; every one of his posts is a work
of art.
Slashdot could really do with a good right-wing manic post now and again.
If you've spotted one lately, please reply to this diary and share the joy.

Finally, we'd like to take you back down amnesia lane.
Trollback will try and make amnesia lane a regular feature from now on.

Adequacy.org announced this month
that they have released their archive of slashdot troll outings
pre-adequacy.org to the drooling masses.
The headcheese archive
is a database of the various adequacy accounts that were used and the
post they made in the name of trolling.
They have conveniently provided the world with a top-ten list of their most
successful posts;
the top-20 direct replies table is a trolling how-to.

Trollback is well aware of your penchant for man-sex,
but usually we are heartened to see that you can drag yourselves away long
enough to post a
month worth of
trolling gold. Not this time; it seems that you and Bubba were
having too much fun to keep up to last month's high standards.

The unfailingly entertaining CmdrTaco

In the event of a short list, Trollback can always fall back on reviewing
the previous month of CmdrTaco diaries and slashdot goings-on.

CmdrTaco shares
his harrowing tale of having a block of ice thrown at his car, narrowly
escaping an icy death.
It was while still in shock that a confused CmdrTaco came up with what was
thought impossible: a way to make moderation even more like a game.
Welcome to the idea of NOT moderation.
We can see no possible confusion arising from a meta-mod reversing the
effects of a NOT moderation meted out by a user to reverse an initial
moderation.

As a warm-up for the coding this moderation change will involve, Taco
decided he would change the comment history page to be cleaner and clearer.
After all, a list of comments in date order is overwhelmingly complex.

Give a 'hacker' a Mac and they become an amateur designer.
Welcome to the new system of grouped comments, which may or may not tell
you which story they are attached to, leading to a page of inconsistently
presented data in no useful order.
Fortunately, he
explains
how preposterous it is to say the page is cluttered: there is less text,
therefore it is less cluttered. We stand corrected.
As always with feature changes, most of the feedback is "pretty cool" -
selective memory at work, although there is a way to turn the new grouping
method off.

Fyodor the Black-Hat and Slashdot

Fyodor revoked SCO's license to redistribute nmap, which counts as something
news-worthy on slashdot. Slashbots were
reminded
of why Fyodor is a black-hat, not a white-hat freedom fighter as slashbots
like to think he is.
The GPL zealots rejoiced, as someone was using the GPL to shake their tiny
fist at SCO.
Fortunately, an anonymous coward, probably scared of putting himself and
his company at risk from being hacked, posted the
truth
behind fyodor's questionable use of the GPL.

While we're briefly on the subject of SCO, we'd like to thank the
SCO$699FeeTroll for
regularly reminding slashbots to pay their licensing fees.

James A C Joyce

Congratulations to
James A C
Joyce, who got four controversial stories posted in February, passing
Trollaxor's previous record of three.

The most controversial article was surprisingly voted to the front page
of K5, causing quite a stir in web-log circles was the unprecedented
Why your Movable
Type blog must die.
James' diary around the time makes for good reading, as he discovers
web-loggers/lamers linking to his story
[1,
2,
3].

K5 Ascii Enactment Players comes to Slashdot

Proving the sort of quality code that makes up the lameness filters, AEP has
arrived at Slashdot. Regulars will be aware of his works on
K5, and hopefully we will see a similar quality of work here.
Trollback presents two small golden nuggets for your review:
[1,
2].

It is a challenge to get
good quality
ascii art past the lameness filter. Even timothy struggled with ascii art
back in the
day. After 250 revisions of the ascii art filter, the editors have
succeeded in gagging their own ascii art, but not the trolls.

Jimmy O'Leary madness

After getting a special mention in the previous edition of Trollback,
Jimmy O'Leary madness reached a two-month high for the month of February.
When CmdrTaco posted the story
"Saturn Rings
But No Spokes" - you can probably guess what happened.
We salute whoever got the
first post
on that story, keeping Jimmy mania alive.

Finally, we'd like to bring your attention to one of the greatest sids on
slashdot: sid 3903.
Take a walk down amnesia lane and recall a day when you could post ascii
art
boobies,
naked Jackie
Chan, and
shemales.
Remember the VA Linux / Slash-dot
giveaways,
and the time when chrisd
bit.
Recall the early days after VA bought
andover.net
for nearly US$1b. Lastly, remember the
trolls.

Welcome to the first monthly edition of Trollback for 2004. This edition
has been a pleasure to put together, thanks to the sheer quantity of quality
posts presented in The List.

omfg ror lolf

One of Trollback's regular duties is to skim through 20721 to make sure that
any posts recorded there for peer review and gentlemanly competition are not
missed when the time comes to assemble The List.
jimmy o'leary has made 20721 readable; the team can laugh at funny crap as we skim through
the wasteland.
Trollback's favourite contribution is this:

> I am a trolling stalwart. Please consider me for president.

only if you tell me your stances on 1) death penalty 2) immigration 3) stem cell research and 4) omfg ror lolf

A round of applause for jimmy, please.

FortKnox

Moving along with the "affirmative action" theme of Trollback, we'd like
to turn briefly to FortKnox.
Despite promising Trollback a few cheap laughs, it would appear that FortKnox
has not been able to follow through with the diary entry where he proclaimed
that he was a troll, and damn good at it.
The diary has been pulled, and trollback is only aware of
one feeble
attempt.
The Trollback team respectfully requests that FortKnox be removed from the
Troll Blacklist.

Thanks in advance.

Goatse.cx

As many of you will already know, the goatse.cx domain has been placed in
registry
lock mode.
Many of you feel as if an important piece of Internet culture has been
censored needlessly, although by now you're probably used to it.
This is not the first time the goatse.cx domain has had troubles.
You can read about the last time over at k5
here.

A bunch of articles
commemorating the demise of goatse.cx were submitted to k5, although only
this one
was considered good enough by the unwashed masses for it to be posted on the front page.

OSDN Ad Parodies

Regular Trollback readers will recall last month's parodies of the OSDN Dating
service advertisements.
It would seem that OSDN is now running an advertisement for a magazine
on open source called "wide open".
The parody for this month can be viewed over at
HuSi.

What is the second greatest achievement after Score: 5, Troll? Here's your
answer.

Finally, you might remember
hearing something
about Linus putting on a pair of speedos for charity. The nice people at Fark.com ran
a photoshop contest on a photo of Linus in his speedos.
The winner is worth
a laugh;
the
rest of the entries are pretty dull.

Trollback is here with the last montly edition of Trollback to cover 2003.
Trollback will post a year in review edition in the coming days, which will
review some of the highlights of the year, as Trollback saw them.

The trollback team has struggled to put together the review.
Trollback has a fair idea of what will make it and what will not, but would
certainly like to hear from the community as to what the highlights were for
you.

Perhaps some fresh perspective will help.

OSDN Dating Service

As if the zoo system wasn't enough of a black-book of booty calls,
OSDN now has partnered with match.com to provide its readers
with even more assistance in the difficult business of finding a
girlfriend
when you're
addicted to linux.
Some discussion on this topic has taken place at
K5
and at
HuSi.

The advertisement for this service is poorly
photoshopped, perhaps one of many reasons why it has been parodied extensively
[1,
2,
3,
4].
While we're on the subject, slashbots ponder if slashdot trolls are
more or less
lonely than they are.

Trollback is not so sure about FortKnox's troll status, but if FortKnox or
one of his many legions of adoring
fans would like to submit a list of FortKnox's finest work, Trollback will
feature that work in the January 2003 edition.

Trollback has many spies, and some of the more pallid,
greasy ones keeps a close eye on IRC. One of our spies managed to
unstick his keys long enough to alert us to this:

<rusty_afk> "The phrases "open source" and "enterprise ready" keep
popping into Trollback's mind, but Trollback cannot figure out why."
<rusty_afk> heh
<rusty_afk> presumably the link is "phrases rusty has never said
without a negation in between them..."

Moderation

Trollback is reluctant to engage in any moderation discussion, since social
engineering is by its nature a fickle process, and everybody likes to think
they have the one perfect solution. Unfortunately, not every organization is
as modest. A brand new site, Everything In Moderation,
promises to have all
the answers for keeping trolls from peeing
in your public pool.

Taco is well known for dancing around the
issue of moderation-talk,
relegating it to his journal, where
virtually no one can post.
Fortunately, Trollback regular Sheetrock is on-hand to translate Taco's journal,
and provide a forum for us all. Still, there is some
concern about the alternative of making moderation entirely open to the
public. Trollback has some concerns, mostly about people having too
much time.

Welcome back, Jack!

Although Trollback comes pretty close, nobody is perfect, and it turns out
we have been failing to track the comments of upstanding consultant Jack Wagner.
Rest assured this tragic oversight has been remedied, and the great man seems to
have started posting again. Trollback welcomes you back!

By way of attonement, here is a selection of Trollback's favourite Wagner links:
[1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7]

It is nearly 400 years since Guy Fawkes was hanged, drawn, and
quartered for attempting to poison the Queen of England.
Once you've tired of celebrating his memory in
the
traditional way, why not come inside and treat yourself to the
October 2003 edition of Trollback?

Slashdot news and happenings

Back in May we
discussed
the psychiatrist's dream that is HanzoSan. All good things must come
to an end, and it seems the same is also true for HanzoSan. After
some inspiring work, that which HanzoSan loves the most was taken away
from him: karma. His
comment history shows his karma has been decimated. Like a tree
falling in the forest with no-one to hear it, HanzoSan cannot be heard
without karma, and he has officially
left the building.
In a rare gesture of kindness, HanzoSan included a list of who to thank
in his diary.

We welcome Pan
T. Hose, who has
already
been a
victim
of CmdrTaco's secret powers. Not only does Pan T. Hose have three entries
in The List, but he gets an honourable mention for starting one of the
best threads of the month. Trollback looks forward to a long line of
posts!

It was pointed out by Trollback follower x.c.v that we never
reported on Mensa Babe.
This was not intentional, so we now present a posthumous
investigation into some of Mensa Babe's finest work as selected
by fellow Trollback fan x.c.v:
[1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9].
Remember, if you see a user who shows potential, and we don't seem to be
tracking said user, an email to Trollback's address or a post to 31337
goes a long way to rectifying
the situation.

It seems to have been a bad month for our favorite glorified blogs.
It seems that everyone have received their fair share of 5xx errors
after triggering boundary conditions by, say, clicking on a story
link, discussed by
Taco in journal
entries. Now I know you keep telling us there's never going to be
a Meta section, but honestly Rob, a rose by any other name...

Elsewhere

Slashdot's 5xx problems were minor compared to the trials of
k5. An age-old problem in systems
maintenance is how to create a test environment that can be guaranteed
to perform exactly as the live environment does. Fortunately, Mr Foster
had a brilliant solution to this problem:
test major
changes on the live server.
What followed was a month of turmoil, where the site was seemingly more
down than up. This problem finally seems to be under control, for reasons
possibly not unrelated to the fact that the servers only have to handle a
fraction of the requests they used to thanks to a large exodus of the
userbase. The phrases "open source" and "enterprise ready" keep popping
into Trollback's mind, but Trollback cannot figure out why.

After a lengthy hiatus, Adequacy.org has resurfaced in the form of an archive. Although a static site,
there are links to all of the comments that made Adequacy.org fun.
The world is once again safe from
teenage hackers.

That's right, trollback is actually on time this month, and with another
great list as well. As will be expected by trollback's readers,
rkz's repost
of xprt's gem takes the cake this month. For the sake
of completeness, trollback would like the URL to the original post
on k5 posted in a comment in this journal. Thanks in advance.

Trollback is heartened to see it has made it to the
mainstream.
There must be something humourous to say to this, but trollback's
comedy muse has failed to materialise.

Trollback had the suggestion to include
this
post in September trollback, as it apparently has something to
do with the true story behind the *BSD trolls. Trollback would like
more information about that post, and invites comment from the submitter.

Finally, some of the more prolific trolls are hard to keep up with,
particularly those who post more than 24 comments inside of 3 days.
Trollback can think of three ways around this:

Trollback ceases to be lazy and leaving things to the last minute

These same trolls emailing trollback their posts for consideration

Someone purchasing trollback a subscription so we can see further back
than the last 24 comments

The first option is unlikely to happen. Perhaps we may be able to get CMF funding?

Welcome to Trollback for August 2003. Trollback is sorry that this
publication is consistently late. If it is any consolation, you
can rest assured that the list this month is great. Congratulations to
all involved.

The Slashdot Submission Life cycle

Some of you might be wondering what the life cycle of a rejected slashdot
submission is.
This
explains all.

Slashdot prophylactics

Just as cows have bells around their necks, and cars have men with red
flags walking in front of them, so do Slashbots have their t-shirt
competition. Anybody who doesn't look at the winners of this
competition will have their trolling licenses revoked.

Parts of America were plunged into darkness due to a terrorist attack,
depriving CmdrTaco of his computer games and stolen MP3s. On the plus
side, this allows us to see how a nerd like CmdrTaco behaves when he
has to live in the real world. Eagerly anticipating tales of jogging,
mountain biking and drunken revelry, trollback checked the journal of a
geek.

Surprisingly, physical activities were not once mentioned, but we do
learn that he played dominoes and listened to the radio solidly. The
report was vague about whether the last part was done huddled in the
corner of the room, rocking back and forth while sobbing.

Who would have thought that restricting
comments in a journal to friends only would create a worthless
circle-jerk? Trollback for one was astounded that such a thing would
happen, especially when the author has so few friends to
begin with. The resulting
journal shows how exciting discussion is promoted by the
troll-prevention measure. Trollback is disheartened at the number of
pimply wannabes who are undoubtedly awestruck by the number of
"celebrities" in the comments.

Better late than never

The astute will notice that this journal entry
from CmdrTaco was actually written towards the end of June; some
things, however, are more important than dates. One such thing would
be an entire journal entry from our site's beloved leader, dedicated
to demonstrating how easy it is to troll him. If anyone would like to
step up to the challenge of trolling Taco into posting your email in
his diary, trollback is ready to hand out the propz.